A compromise in the Senate kept Republicans from expanding the Hyde Amendment’s ban on the use of federal funds for abortion care. The final bill still denies funding for abortion services to underage victims of sex trafficking, who are overwhelmingly likely to become pregnant after enduring multiple rapes per day.

Pro-choice representatives praised the passage of the JVTA without referencing the abortion restriction.

“Today marks a monumental step forward for human trafficking and sexual assault survivors all across the United States,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) in a statement.

Kate D’Adamo, national policy advocate at the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project, told RH Reality Check in an interview that the parental rights provision seemed promising, but that the wounded veterans idea was “flawed” and “ineffective” because it asks traumatized veterans with no experience to take a “vigilante” role on behalf of traumatized children.

Another amendment to the bill is raising alarms among civil liberties advocates for its potential to harm Internet freedom.

The Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation (SAVE) Act could hold website owners criminally liable if someone advertises sex trafficking on their site. Advocates note that this could chill free speech on the Internet, and even backfire if sites stop exercising oversight so they can’t be accused of having knowledge of illegal activity.

Shutting down online advertising spaces for prostitution is said to be ineffective because online advertising helps law enforcement track traffickers, and dangerous because it forces people engaged in consensual sex work to solicit on the streets instead of vetting clients beforehand.

Many advocates have understandably focused on the Supreme Court in recent weeks. But what gets lost in that focus are the stories that show the right to basic bodily autonomy is at stake for sex workers, trans people of color, and those who are disproportionately incarcerated.

Recent Supreme Court rulings have not been great for reproductive justice. If the destruction of Massachusetts’ clinic buffer zone law wasn’t enough of a gut punch, the Hobby Lobby decision was a solid finish.

The list of ways that these decisions will hinder access to effective, safe reproductive health care seems endless. But while reproductive justice advocates focused on the Supreme Court steps these past several weeks, reproductive justice was being challenged on the West Coast, where two events had implications for reproductive justice: The FBI shut down MyRedBook.com, a Bay Area website for sex workers, only days after queer activists’ protest of Kink.com’s prison-themed party. In both cases, bodily autonomy—the keystone of reproductive justice—was at stake, for sex workers, trans people of color, and those who are disproportionately incarcerated.

Both events demonstrated that reproductive justice—the right to make healthy and safe decisions about one’s body—is being infringed upon beyond the Supreme Court’s rulings restricting access to abortion and birth control, and those who live at the intersections of oppressions are the most under attack.

On June 25, the FBI shut down MyRedBook.com, a website where sex workers could screen clients and negotiate rates online. The Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) mourned the shutdown as the loss of “a private, discreet venue for negotiations that otherwise often happen in a public venues or on the street.”

As Truthout reports, the loss of MyRedBook.com “not only cut off a source of income for sex workers, but also a source of information and community.” In the message boards archived by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MyRedBook users ask for advice regarding health concerns, financial affairs, and safety tips for meeting with clients. “MyRedBook.com [was] the only accessible advertising and community forum for sex workers of all income levels,” said Kristina Dolgin, Bay Area SWOP organizer, in a phone interview. “When you criminalize sex work, you’re driving sex workers underground. Now that MyRedBook.com is gone, people will still do what they need to do to survive—but without that community they are more at risk for exploitation.”

Dolgin highlighted a desire to stop sex trafficking as one of the reasons why law enforcement targeted sex worker resources—the shutdown has been hyped by CNN “as a move made as part of a broader crackdown on the sex trafficking of minors.” But the charges filed against MyRedBook.com proprietors were unrelated to human trafficking or child prostitution. According to news reports, they were charged with interstate travel in aid of racketeering.

Dolgin also noted the disappearance of harm reduction resources that provide information and community for sex workers (such as Craiglist). “This is a trend that is happening across the United States,” she said.

Late June also saw queer and trans organizers in the Bay Area challenge a prison-themed Pride event thrown by Kink.com, a fetish website. The queer activist groups Gay Shame and LaGai organized a protest against the “Prison of Love” party. Promotional material for the party boasted of “solitary confinement [and] showers” and asked, “What kind of trouble will 3000 of the world’s hottest men get into when in lockdown?”

In an open letter to the party’s organizers released by the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex (TGI) Justice Project, signatories explained they were “appalled by the casual use of the Prison Industrial Complex, which destroys the lives of millions of people and kills thousands every year, as a party theme. At a time when public discussion and media finally has an eye toward the daily systemic violence against trans and queer people, your party theme and promotions are especially harmful and trivializing.”

Trans and queer people, particularly trans women of color, experience extremely high rates of incarceration: According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, “Black and Latino/a risk for incarceration due only to gender identity/expression were much higher than the overall sample’s experience, at 41% and 21% respectively.” Comparatively, only 2.7 percent of the U. S. population reports being incarcerated in their lifetime, according to a 2003 study. Trans people of color also experienced substantially higher rates of sexual assault and harassment while incarcerated than both the white trans people surveyed and the general population.

For those who gathered in protest, the party theme was a flippant symbol of disproportionate incarceration rates for people of color and trans people. “[C]olonialism and white supremacy value some bodies and drastically dehumanize other bodies— [incarceration] and [policing] are part of the process of exerting control over those bodies,” said danielle west, an organizer with the TGI Justice Project, who was present at the protest.

That these two incidents occurred within days of each other, in the same city, is coincidental, but what they reveal about law enforcement, incarceration, and the boundaries of the reproductive justice movement are revealing in conjunction. Both events are symptomatic of structural injustice in everything from policing to incarceration. Both went largely unreported by national media. Both affected those targeted, be they sex workers or incarcerated queer people, along lines of race, gender, and class.

But most importantly, both events were related to issues of bodily autonomy: bodily autonomy for those who contend with structural oppression based on multiple forms of identity. Sex workers were stripped of the resources they needed to operate safely, there was no disruption of the systemic incarceration of trans and queer people, and even more queer and trans people were subject to arrest and involvement with the justice system. These are not unusual occurrences, but both cases demonstrate how the criminalization of sex work is used as a tool to confine and limit the autonomy of some individuals based on racist, misogynist, and transmisogynist ideology.

Reproductive justice, at its root, is about bodily autonomy—for all people, without stipulations or caveats. When we ignore the infringement of that autonomy on some bodies—particularly the bodies of those who are most marginalized, including sex workers, people of color, and trans women—it is not an accident. Rather, it is a reflection of the imposition of structural power on all bodies.

Without emphasis on how mass incarceration and targeted policing infringes on the bodily autonomy of sex workers, trans women, and Black and brown people, there can be no reproductive justice for all. A movement that ignores these things reifies the patriarchy and the systemic racism and transmisogyny we seek to reject.

To focus only on bodily autonomy only in certain places or for certain people is not justice. To disregard the way that bodily autonomy is prioritized for certain issues, without acknowledging how control over one’s body is a right offered in the current system based on meeting certain parameters of normativity, whether in need or in identity, is not justice either. The protest of the prison party and the shutdown of MyRedBook.com show that challenges to bodily autonomy will come from all sides, and those who are most affected will be those whose autonomy is already infringed upon as a matter of course. In order to build a reproductive justice movement that is as strong and multifaceted as the people working as part of it, these issues must move from the periphery to front and center.

"End demand" campaigns, like the one suggested in a recent RH Reality Check commentary, are based on the false characterization of clients of sex workers as rapists, and perpetuated by the prostitution-as-violence camp. This is nothing but misogyny, pure and simple.

For the last seven years, I’ve been working as an escort in Ottawa and, most recently, in Toronto. I’ve seen approximately 100 unique clients (this does not include repeat clients) per year and not one of them has ever been anything less than respectful.

“End demand” campaigns, like the one suggested in a recent RH Reality Check commentary, are based on the false characterization of clients of sex workers as rapists, and perpetuated by the prostitution-as-violence camp. This is nothing but misogyny, pure and simple.

To suggest that women cannot differentiate between their work and when they have been assaulted is grossly offensive.

Yasmin Vafa’s piece, “Racial Injustice: The Case for Prosecuting Buyers as Sex Traffickers,” celebrates “demand reduction” as a trafficking prevention strategy, particularly in the case of minors. The issues of child prostitution and child trafficking are highly charged, sensitive subjects and I have no intention of diminishing the abuses that do occur. However, Vafa’s piece, while well-intentioned, is misguided in a number of ways.

In these discussions, rarely are the actors identified clearly; rather we get the generalized subjects “children” and “buyers,” leaving the reader to imagine the worst-case scenario, such as the survivor account Vafa references in her piece. These two groups are not homogenous.

First, let us examine the category of the “child.” According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a child is anyone under the age of 18. To further complicate things, the UN defines a “youth” as anyone between 15 and 24 years old. Even the most ardent defender of children would concede that those persons aged 15, 16, and 17 are more accurately categorized as youth and that their participation in sexual relations is different than those of younger children.

And who are the buyers really?

Research shows that a portion of buyers are actually youth purchasing sex from other youth. As Julia O’Connell Davidson has stated, “who really believes that a sexual relationship between a 19-year-old and a 17-year-old should be categorized as a sexual relationship between an ‘adult’ and a ‘child’?”

The sordid picture of older men luring young children into prostitution is also largely exaggerated. Heather Montgomery’s research with child prostitutes in Thailand revealed that often children pimp for each other. She observes that while myths about child prostitution make it “inconceivable that children should pimp for each other and a take a cut of the earnings of another child who has become a prostitute … this is exactly what does happen as part of the children’s survival strategies.”

Further, children who have friends and acquaintances working in prostitution may see that prostitution offers a means of subsistence, making it a viable survival option. Therefore, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act has the potential to criminalize the very children we are supposed to be defending. In Canada, this reality came to pass when two 15-year-old girls were charged with human trafficking.

A criminal record is no way to help children and youth leave prostitution.

Further, putting vulnerable children and youth in the hands of the police is a dangerous business. Police in Ottawa regularly extort sex workers for favors on threat of arrest, physically and sexually assault women, and harass street-based workers, the majority of whom are Aboriginal women. The Cato Institute’s 2010 Annual Report on Police Misconduct in the United States noted:

Of the officers associated with reports of serious sexual misconduct, 51% (180) were involved with reports that involved minors and 49% (174) involved adults.

However, of the 479 alleged victims of serious sexual misconduct which were tracked, 52% (249) were minors and 48% (230) were adults. This would appear to indicate that minors are victims of alleged serial offenders slightly more often than adults.

Placing the focus on the buyers obscures the ways in which the state is culpable in perpetuating violence against women and children, whether or not they are sex workers. It is naïve to think that a state which consistently violates the rights of sex workers will produce a desirable outcome by introducing stronger legal penalties.

A second critique I have of her piece is her support of a bill that proposes to prosecute buyers as sex traffickers, a conflation of prostitution and trafficking, which are two separate categories. Even when referring to child prostitution, a distinction must be made between trafficking and consensual prostitution. The Global Commission on HIV and the Law writes that the conflation of trafficking and sexual exploitation “has ultimately served to undermine efforts to address both trafficking and sexual commerce, while inadvertently contributing to the harm that people working in sexual commerce face from local law enforcement and from potentially violent clients and intermediaries.”

In January, police services across Canada initiated “Project Northern Spotlight” aimed at finding victims of human trafficking. Officers posed as clients and in Ottawa visited 29 women, all of whom were legally adults and none of whom were trafficked. Quinn, one of the workers who was visited, described the visit by four police officers as threatening and intimidating, particularly given the fact that she was a woman, alone, in lingerie, and expecting a client. If the police were so concerned with finding trafficking victims, why did they largely target independent adult escorts?

In Sweden, where the laws targeting clients of sex workers have been in place since 1999, sex work has been pushed further underground. Sex workers have little time to screen their clients because clients fear arrest. Sex workers are subpoenaed and ordered to testify against their clients in court. Many clients simply start seeing workers indoors, leaving only those clients who are otherwise undesirable for street-based workers (e.g., they have a criminal record already), as well as increasing competition among women for a reduced client base. If they choose to operate indoors, which is safer than working on the street, they can be evicted because landlords are charged with profiting off a sex worker’s earnings—their rent—if they do not evict the tenant.

Sex working mothers run the risk of losing custody of their children. The case of Petite Jasmine, a Swedish sex worker, is exemplary on this point. Her children were taken from her because of her work in the sex industry and given to her abusive husband, who later stabbed her to death during a visit with her children.

In Canada, the conservative government recently tabled a bill entitled the “Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act,” which also criminalizes the clients of sex workers, among a host of other provisions. But a recent study published in the British Medical Journal shows that criminalizing our clients reproduces the harms experienced under criminalization, which corroborates the evidence coming out of Sweden.

We cannot know the full extent to which children are sold as “sex slaves.” Figures are exaggerated or outright fabricated, and because it is a clandestine activity, it is very difficult to quantify. However, if we rely on statistics from the FBI database regarding the number of children arrested for prostitution offenses (not the number of children trafficked) between 1981 and 2012, we see that minors selling sex make up only 1.83 percent of prostitution arrests over a 31-year period. If buyers are fueling the demand for underage sex workers, one would think there would be higher numbers of children selling sex. In Canada, where the act of selling sex has never been illegal, there were zero recorded instances of trafficking of minors between 2008 and 2012, according to Statistics Canada. Meanwhile, the incidents of adult trafficking were just under 50 and include all forms of trafficking, not just those being trafficked into the sex industry.

Finally, making child prostitution and child trafficking an issue of demand detracts from systemic issues that cause children to sell sex in the first place. We ignore the political, economic, and social inequalities that underpin this phenomenon. Without measures to address the conditions under which children make the decision to sell sex, criminalizing clients is nothing but a band-aid solution.

If more than half of the male population has used the services of a sex worker at some point, there is no way we can arrest all the men who have ever bought or ever would buy sex. Furthermore, criminalizing clients means that when clients do come across potentially coerced workers, they will not report it due to fear of arrest.

The continued conflation of trafficking and consensual prostitution leads to more violence and abuse of sex workers. If we are really and truly concerned with the welfare of children and youth working in the sex industry, we need to start thinking about affordable housing, access to services, and alternate employment opportunities. “End demand” has not worked. Let’s stop moralizing and fight for tangible resources to assist those working in the sex industry.

Compared with colleagues in some of their neighboring countries, sex workers in Switzerland appear to have it quite good. Prostitution there has been legal since 1942, and the country is known today for its a fairly liberal and pragmatic approach to the industry. News of the “drive in” sex boxes installed on the streets of the country’s largest city, Zurich, to offer privacy for street prostitutes and their clients went around the world and was heralded by many (although criticized by some) as an example of a sex-friendly policy. The requirement for sex workers to pay taxes and social security contributions is another example of the integration of the industry into regular Swiss public and bureaucratic life.

But even in countries with a liberal attitude toward selling sex, issues steeped in morality tend to find a way to creep in. In Switzerland, it comes in the shape of a legislative hangover from the ’60s that blocks the legal rights of prostitutes in the courts and leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. In Switzerland, an oral agreement is legally recognized as a binding contract, just as it would be if it had been written down. Every time a sex worker agrees with a client on the price, time, and any other terms of their exchange, a contract is made.

One of the ways a contract—made by anyone—can be declared null and void is if a court decides it is immoral. This is what the Swiss Federal Court, the country’s highest court, did around 30 years ago with prostitution. So today, even though prostitution is legal, sex workers cannot rely on the courts to uphold their legitimate employment complaints.

“The advantage to having contracts would be that sex workers could go to the justice system when they say that they haven’t been paid or the price is not normal or anything like that,” explained Michel Félix de Vidas, spokesperson for Aspasie, a Swiss association representing sex workers in the country. De Vidas warns that without the confidence that they will be backed up, sex workers are left vulnerable to exploitation, even though they are working legally. “It should be based on human rights rather than morality. Here sex workers have to pay health care, they have to pay [taxes], so they should have rights,” he says. Those advocating for a change in the law in favor of the legal rights of sex workers point out that the judgment was made at a different time in a society that was not the same as the Switzerland of today.

“There has been an evolution in society,” said Andreas Caroni, a lawyer and politician for the liberal FDP party in Switzerland. “This judgment was a 1960s and 1970s position towards prostitution. Switzerland was quite conservative with some of its policies around sex and sexuality until 1990. It was even punishable to advertise condoms, for example. Now, in 2014, I think quite a few people would agree that these contracts are fine, or at least normal.”

Caroni says that he asked his party’s member on the Swiss Federal Council if this was also his view on the world. “He replied that he no longer sees such contracts as immoral,” said Caroni. He added that there are federal court judges who would see it this way too if a case was brought before them.

A report by the country’s Federal Department of Justice and Migration published last month has also added pressure for strengthening the legal rights of prostitutes, pushing the issue further up the political agenda. The report, which included contributions from experts from a broad range of groups working in or around the industry, concluded that there are several key priorities for sex workers in the country, including the need for better protection from exploitation. “There have been some problems for prostitutes, such as abusive situations, violence, exploitation, working conditions—this isn’t helping the women,” said Ursina Jud Huwiler, who coordinated the report for the department.

Reiterating their position against adopting the Swedish model of criminalizing the purchase of sex, the experts in the report agreed that to improve working conditions, there must be an abolition of moral legal standards and improved protection. “This is one of the main recommendations made for changes in the law: more protection for sex workers,” said Jud Huwiler. She added that there is now a sense that things are beginning to change regarding the issue of contracts between sex workers and clients.

Recent challenges to the law also suggest that the country is on the verge of improving these legal rights—it’s just a matter of exactly how to do it. In Zurich a few months ago, a court contradicted the federal court judgment when it ruled that a contract between a prostitute and a “John” was not immoral and therefore valid. But this judgment does not automatically apply to the country’s other courts. Now the Canton of Bern, one of the 26 regions in Switzerland, has called on the Committee of Legal Affairs of the National Council to create a legal basis for saying contracts between sex workers and “Johns” are valid.

Caroni, who sits on the committee, said committee members are thinking about how support for sex workers’ rights could be put on the books. “So we don’t just have to rely on the courts, we are thinking about how we should write it into law. To keep up the pressure, we asked the federal administration for guidance on how this could be written in if it was needed, and we are still waiting to hear the options. But if a federal court decides that the contract is moral then we won’t need to do anything; it is just a back up plan,” he said.

One of the problems with this “plan A” is that it might be a while before a federal court ever gets to hear a case that deals with this issue, as it would need to go through all the lower courts first.

Aspasie is one organization that’s calling for a top-down approach to legislative change—but the group also thinks the legal problems for sex workers extend further, to the issue of contracts with brothel owners as well as with “Johns.” At the moment, there is a section written into the country’s criminal code, called Article 195, that states sex work activity must not be supervised or controlled by someone else, and prostitutes must be free to “determine the time, place, volume or other aspects of their work.” This regulation was included with the intention of protecting people from exploitation and trafficking, but according to Aspasie’s Félix de Vidas, because Article 195 makes it difficult to bring complaints over a contract with a brothel owner to a judge, it should be revisited.

Ursina Jud Huwiler agrees that the law as it stands means it is not possible for prostitutes to work in such a way that they are dependent on others, with what the Swiss call a “classical working contract,” but pointed out that the group of experts recommended in their report that self-employment offers better protection for sex workers.

“This is a separate issue to the morality one—this is about self-determination,” she said. “The majority of the group agreed that it would be better if the prostitutes are self-employed. The majority of the group thought that working independently gives prostitutes better protection and that it doesn’t protect them from everything, but that it does protect them a little more.”

Update, March 14, 3:25 p.m.: Monica Jones appeared in court this morning, pleading innocent to charges that she had “manifested” prostitution. However, the trial was postponed until April 11.

According to a statement from the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project Phoenix, “Ms. Jones’ lawyer filed a motion challenging this statute on constitutional grounds, resulting in Ms. Jones’ trial being postponed. … Ms. Jones states, ‘We will be back with twice as many people.'”

“Sex workers are humans, too!” read the sign Monica Jones held up outside Bethany Bible Church in Phoenix last May. Jones, along with a dozen or so others from the local sex worker community, was holding a vigil on the sidewalk opposite the church. Inside, police were dropping off women they’d detained that day on prostitution-related charges. Volunteers at the church greeted the women, who arrived in handcuffs.

This is Project ROSE (Reaching Out on Sexual Exploitation). If the women agreed to enter the program, the project volunteers explained, their prostitution charges could be dropped. It is just one in a growing trend of “prostitution diversion” programs, pairing police and prosecutors with social service providers, targeting sex workers through stings on the streets and online, aiming at removing women from the sex trade.

Project ROSE founder and University of Arizona social work professor Dominique Roe-Sepowitz describes Project ROSE as an “arrest alternative.” Within 36 hours of the protest last May, nearly 100 people suspected of being sex workers would be brought to Bethany Bible Church and offered Project ROSE as an “alternative” to arrest. One would be Monica Jones.

On March 14—nearly ten months later—Jones goes to trial to fight these charges. She’ll be joined by supporters from Sex Workers Outreach Project-Phoenix (SWOP-PHX) to fight against not only her arrest last May but to protest Project ROSE’s role in anti-prostitution policing. “They don’t really arrest you with Project ROSE,” Jaclyn Dairman, one of the founders of SWOP-PHX told RH Reality Check. “They just kind of kidnap you.”

“Once You’ve Prostituted, You Can Never Not Have Prostituted”

Project ROSE began in September 2011, and operates twice per year in Phoenix. First, police conduct stings and detain people suspected of selling sex, and bring them to Bethany Bible Church. There, Project ROSE staff determines if they are eligible to take part in the program. “All eligible Project ROSE clients must agree to complete the Prostitution Diversion Program,” states the project’s brochure. “If completed, the arrest from the sweep is not filed. If they do not complete the diversion program, their arrest is filed and when they report to court to respond to the arrest, they are again offered a plea agreement to either attend the Prostitution Diversion Program or serve jail time.”

An Al Jazeera America Tonightreport on Project ROSE’s October 2013 operation showed women brought to Bethany Bible Church in handcuffs. Some were in tears. Uniformed officers stood next to posters hung in the church, printed with pink roses, directing volunteers to the various stations that those detained will be brought to: “1st STOP: CHECK-IN. 2nd STOP: POLICE. 3rd STOP: PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE.”

Al Jazeera reports that since the program began, more than 350 people detained on prostitution-related offenses have been brought to Project ROSE. Only 30 percent complete the program, meaning that the majority will face mandatory minimum penalties for prostitution: In the City of Phoenix, that’s 15 days in jail for a first conviction, 30 days for a second conviction, and 60 days for a third conviction. On subsequent convictions, the State of Arizona considers the offense a felony, with a mandatory minimum of 180 days in jail, a measure signed into law by former Gov. Janet Napolitano in 2006.

It’s primarily women brought to Project ROSE by police—by their own accounting, Project ROSE states that only five men and eight “transgender persons” (whose gender was not further specified) have been brought to the program. Though they are threatened with criminal charges, there is no public defender on site to advise them of their rights, only a prosecutor. It’s prosecutors who tell those detained that their prostitution-related charges will not be filed if they comply with the program’s requirement to entering the prostitution diversion program, which is operated by Catholic Charities of Arizona and is called DIGNITY.

“Catholic Charities Community Services recognizes prostituted women as victims of sex trafficking,” DIGNITY’s program materials state, “and helps them to escape ‘the life’ through DIGNITY (Developing Individual Growth and New Independence Through Yourself).” The 36-hour program provides “self exploration and education to develop self esteem and give hope.”

DIGNITY’s focus on self-esteem is echoed by Project ROSE founder Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, who told an Al Jazeera interviewer last October, “Once you’ve prostituted, you can never not have prostituted. You are always identified even by yourself that way—having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you, and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like and intimacy.”

Roe-Sepowitz declined to comment for this story.

But what Project ROSE actually claims to provide is ways for women to leave sex work, which doesn’t involve finding other ways to have sex, but finding other ways to make a living. RH Reality Check asked Jaclyn Dairman of SWOP-PHX what Project ROSE was doing to meet the economic needs of women brought to the program. They aren’t, she said. “Project ROSE is taking that away from them.”

As for what they do provide, “the services that Project ROSE offers are already available,” said Dairman, “they’re just hard to find.” During both the May and October 2013 Project ROSE operations, SWOP-PHX did its own street outreach, distributing water and condoms and “Know Your Rights” flyers and posters in areas known for sex work. “I probably emailed, called, and texted 150 workers on Backpage right before the stings,” said Dairman, “and I got really good responses from most of the workers. It’s so hard to create a community with sex workers here because you have your community organizations turning up to arrest them to provide services. Who can they trust? Perhaps if these organizations did their own outreach to sex workers then they wouldn’t have to arrest them to provide services.”

Some social workers have also criticized the program for using the threat of prosecution to get people into services. “Interventions like Project ROSE violate standards of informed consent and individuals’ rights to full participation,” wrote Stéphanie Wahab and Meg Panichelli in Affilia.“The only services offered to escape prosecution are through a particular diversion program further limiting the options for support and assistance.”

“To be taken to social services in handcuffs rather than to prison is different, but whether it’s similar or not, it’s not an answer,” said Andrea Richie, an attorney and co-coordinator of the LGBTQQ social justice project Streetwise and Safe, which also includes people in the sex trade. What’s needed isn’t necessarily diversion from sex work, Richie explained, but meeting the present needs of people engaged in sex work.

“People are demanding the things they need every day,” said Richie, “whether they’re demanding affordable housing, or a living wage, or access to health care that allows people to preserve their gender identity. People are demanding those things every single day and not getting them. So to have an arrest-meditated referral system to a program that’s not meeting the basic needs that they’ve identified, it’s just a waste of everyone’s resources and it’s another form of punishment.”

“I Have a Right to My Own Body”

On the day of the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project protest of Project ROSE in May 2013, Monica Jones, who is a former sex worker and a transgender woman, used her account on Backpage.com—where she had previously placed adult services ads—to post a warning about the Project ROSE stings, which she heard about through SWOP. Since she was using her old account, her ad contained the city where she lives and old photos of her.

The next night, Jones was walking to meet friends at a bar, a man offered her a ride. She got in the car. “Then,” said Jones, “it went to, ‘How much would it cost for me to hang out with you?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’”

Jones said she told the man to turn off the road and let her out at the bar, but he refused. He moved his car into the middle lane of traffic. “I couldn’t get out of the car,” she said.

“His reaction told me, OK, this was a cop,” she said. “And so I just sat there.”

Jones was right. A police report documenting Jones’ May 17 detention confirmed the Phoenix Police Department’s participation in Project ROSE at the time, and the man who picked her up, Daniel Hinz, was an undercover police officer.

Hinz pulled his car over and was joined by a marked police car. Jones said a uniformed officer who had just arrived asked her if she was “working tonight.”

In the police report, Officer Hinz claimed, “[W]ithout any previous conversation SP1 Jones approached my vehicle and pulled down the front of his dress and exposed his breast to me”—a claim Jones disputes. Hinz further claimed, “I asked him if he had some time and he said he did.” Later, Hinz said, “I asked SP1 Jones if I could get some head and he nodded his head in agreement.”

While the report lists Jones’ legal name (Monica Jones) and gender (female) as it appears on her driver’s license, the officers repeatedly referred to her in the report as “he” and “him.” As Andrea Richie explained to RH Reality Check, being mispronouned or misgendered by police is common for transgender individuals and often “precedes other serious kinds of misconduct by police, including searches to assign people genders, or to view their genitals, or invasive questions about their bodies, and about procedures they may or may not have had, and then often, also precedes physical abuse or sexual abuse.”

In this case, Jones was placed in handcuffs and told she had “manifested” prostitution. She was given the option to go to jail or to Project ROSE.

When Monica Jones was brought by police to Project ROSE in May, she had already been arrested on a prostitution-related charge, and she had served time, in a men’s jail. “That’s the reason I didn’t want to go to jail,” said Jones. The Maricopa County 4th Avenue Jail in Phoenix—whose website boasts it is “part of the largest county jail expansion project in the history of the nation, supported overwhelmingly by the taxpayers of Maricopa County” and prominently features a headshot of infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio—is where Jones was incarcerated for a prior arrest. “I was isolated,” she said. “I was put into this little room by myself.” Jones said both guards and other prisoners harassed her. “I was so petrified of going through that again.”

Once Jones was taken to Project ROSE, she was not permitted to make a phone call. She said she wasn’t read her Miranda rights, and when she asked to speak to a lawyer, “They took me to a prosecutor,” she said. “I said, ‘No, I want a public defender.’ They said there’s no public defender here.” Project ROSE’s factsheet states, “Clients at Project ROSE do not require legal representation, as they are not under arrest.” Still, a prosecutor interviews the sex workers brought to Project ROSE. “They were trying to get me to admit that I was working,” said Jones.

Monica Jones was familiar with the DIGNITY program, which prosecutors would now require her to complete for her charges to be dropped. When she was arrested on charges of “manifesting” prostitution in 2008, she opted to participate in the program, though she didn’t agree with its messages. “In there, you know, they said, ‘these women are weak, they need help, this [sex work] is a bad thing,'” Jones told RH Reality Check. “And I said, ‘well, you know, I’m doing it because the money is good, and I can make my own hours, and I’m going to school.'”

“They kept saying, ‘this is battered women syndrome.’ I’d say, ‘I have a right to my own body,’ and they would try to shush me up.”

Mid-way through the program, Jones said she was asked by staff to not come back. “I got a phone call saying I had passed the class, and I didn’t need to come back anymore.”

“They didn’t want my personality to rub off on the other girls,” Jones said.

Cathy Bauer, DIGNITY program director, would not confirm if Monica Jones had been a participant in the program or discuss any additional details of the DIGNITY program.

Because Jones had been through the DIGNITY program already, when she was charged with “manifestation” in May, she was found ineligible for Project ROSE. But she didn’t find out until three months later, when in August she was sent a summons to appear in court on charges of “manifesting” prostitution.

Last fall, after receiving her summons, Jones was coming home to her apartment late one night, she told RH Reality Check, and two Phoenix police officers were waiting in the vestibule of her building. “I didn’t pay no mind, just tried to keep my head down. But one of the cops turned and recognized me and said, ‘Are you staying here now? I haven’t seen you out on Van Buren (an area known for sex work). Do you still go out there?'”

“Seeing the cops over from Van Buren at my complex was just weird,” she said.

Monica Jones is now a student in the same social work program at ASU that employs Roe-Sepowitz, the Project ROSE founder. Jones spent the day before last Thanksgiving—two days before her birthday—in court. Her “manifestation” charge will now go to trial on March 14, and she will plead not guilty. SWOP-PHX has raised funds to cover her legal fees. They have also, along with their supporters the Best Practices Policy Project, filed a report with United Nations’ Human Rights Committee, alleging violations of due process and discriminatory policing connected to Arizona’s anti-prostitution law enforcement and Project ROSE.

“What I hope is I’m found not guilty,” Jones told RH Reality Check. “I hope the truth comes out—yes, that I was profiled. I hope to be vindicated.”

In most countries, the concept of sex workers’ human rights has been unthinkable for the last few millennia. As Bubbles, the co-founder of the blog Tits and Sass, has observed, “Sex workers are generally portrayed as victims or punchlines.”

Recent political developments, however, suggest some growing political awareness of sex workers as human beings. On December 20, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Attorney General of Canada v. Terri Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch, and Valerie Scott. These three women, self-identified sex workers, filed suit in 2007 because they felt three provisions in the Canadian Criminal Code violated their constitutional rights.

Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of the health, safety and lives of prostitutes. … The prohibitions all heighten the risks. … They do not merely impose conditions on how prostitutes operate. They go a critical step further, by imposing dangerous conditions on prostitution; they prevent people engaged in a risky—but legal—activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risks.

The Court agreed on a one-year suspension of the ruling to give Parliament time to respond. If lawmakers choose to pursue passage of new prohibitions, they will be obliged, under the ruling, to ensure that they do not violate sex workers’ right to safety.

Prostitution, per se, is not illegal in Canada, but the decision and other laws circumscribe its practice. Laws against brothel keeping specifically put indoor sex workers at risk of arrest, and the ban on living on the avails criminalizes a sex worker’s children and other people who are supported by her earnings. The public communications laws severely affect the estimated 5 to 20 percent of Canadian sex workers who are street-based. By compelling them to complete negotiations quickly (in order to avoid arrest), it deprives them of the time needed to assess the potential risk of going with a prospective client.

The Pivot Legal Society, Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence, and the PACE (Providing Alternatives Counseling and Education) Society all worked in coalition with the Bedford petitioners and other sex worker groups to advance the case. When Pivot was allotted time to address the Supreme Court directly, a collective decision was made that Pivot’s legal director, Katrina Pacey, would use the time to “paint a picture” for the justices of the violence sex workers routinely experience under existing laws. They agreed that Pacey would emphasize the “Bad Date Sheet,” a tool used by sex workers to record and share descriptions of clients known to be dangerous and predatory. Pacey told the justices that “having time to adequately screen a client means having time to refer to the information on this sheet … and it can be a life-saving measure … time to communicate, time to screen, can mean the difference between life and death for a sex worker.”

This struck a deep chord because of the epidemic of missing and murdered women—most of them sex workers—that Canada has experienced in the last three decades. At the center of this was Robert Pickton, a serial killer in British Columbia who told an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 women and wished he could have made it an even 50 before his arrest. Pickton was charged in 2002 with the murders of 26 women, most of them sex workers and/or drug users from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood. He was convicted in 2007 of killing six of them, with the 20 other charges stayed, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Pickton is far from an anomaly. Seattle’s Gary Ridgway (the “Green River Killer”) was convicted in 2003 of murdering 48 women, and later confessed to killing 71 in all. He said he picked sex workers specifically because “I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.” Meanwhile, the search for the alleged Gilgo Beach serial killer in Long Island, New York, is ongoing. The first woman went missing in 2007, and to date ten to 14 of the bodies identified on that isolated section of beach are thought to have been his victims. As in the cases above, the New York police have been repeatedly accused of insufficient action because many of the murdered women were sex workers.

After hearing Pacey’s statement to the Court, Chief Justice McLaughlin wrote in her opinion, “If screening could have prevented one woman from jumping into Robert Pickton’s car, the severity of the harmful effects [of the law] is established.”

A breakthrough of a different type, but similar in proportion, occurred in South Africa on December 10, when the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) launched its National Strategic Plan for HIV Prevention, Care and Treatment for Sex Workers. The Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and Sisonke (a South African movement advocating for the rights of adult, consenting sex workers) were pivotal in the plan’s development and describe it as a “comprehensive rights- and evidence-based approach to HIV interventions within the sex worker key population.” Maria Stacey, SWEAT’s deputy director, added, “Following World Health Organisation guidelines on HIV prevention amongst sex workers, the Plan does advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work.”

SANAC, an entity made up of government ministries, civil society organizations, and private sector corporations, is charged with building and coordinating the HIV and AIDS response for a country with the world’s largest population of people living with HIV. This new program launch is a historic development in what has been a prolonged political battle. When the SANAC board approved a final draft of its 2012-16 National Strategic Plan on HIV, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and Tuberculosis (commonly referred to as the 2012 NSP) in November 2011, the draft contained language directing the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and the South African Law Reform Commission to “take urgent steps to finalise the legislative reform process. … This must result in the tabling of a bill to decriminalize adult sex work by no later than 30 June 2013. Thereafter, SANAC must closely monitor the law reform process in Parliament.’’

When formally issued on World AIDS Day a few weeks later, however, SANAC’s plan omitted that language, replacing it with the following: “Decriminalisation of sex work is a matter that has been a subject of debate and society should continue to deliberate on the matter until final resolution.” As one SANAC member commented, “Government ministers, officials, other sectors and NGOs at the meeting endorsed this [decriminalization] as a key, evidence-based. Now, in one week, all that has dissolved.”

The sex workers’ rights and HIV prevention advocates who had been working for over a decade to get the board-approved language into the 2012 NSP saw this deletion as, once again, fatally dismissive of sex workers’ lives. Data from 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available) showed an HIV prevalence of 43 percent among female sex workers surveyed in Johannesburg, evidence of the government’s disregard for their need for effective HIV prevention interventions.

The two-year turnaround from this political betrayal to the launching of a national program dedicated to their needs is attributed to (among other factors) the 2012 hiring of SANAC’s new CEO, Dr. Fareed Abdullah, and the government’s decision to make SANAC an independent entity, answerable to all its constituencies. Abdullah came to the job with a decade of experience “pioneering” innovative HIV programming in South Africa, as well as service at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). The first grant he authorized from SANAC’s newly independent budget was to SWEAT.

The new National Plan for HIV Prevention, Care and Treatment for Sex Workers not only includes the provision of a full package of sexual and reproductive health services to an estimated 153,000 sex workers in the country (including sexually transmitted infection screening and treatment, post-exposure prophylaxis for rape and sexual assault, contraception, and peer support, as well as education, condoms, and lubricant) but also funds measures to reduce violence and human rights abuses against them. In an interview shortly before the ICASA launch, Abdullah said that “[t]his approach allows the social capital of the sex work community to be strengthened—which we know to be protective for HIV.” He added, “The time has come for us to suspend our moral judgments in respect of sex work in the interest of the public health of the nation and human rights.”

Interestingly, former U.S. ambassador Mark Dybul was among the panelists at the ICASA session where the new plan was launched. Currently the CEO of the Global Fund, Dybul was one of the founding architects of PEPFAR, serving as U.S. Global AIDS coordinator from 2006 to 2009. In his remarks at the ICASA launch, Dybul described the fact that HIV-positive sex workers are 12 times less likely to receive antiretroviral treatment than other people living with HIV as “appalling,” and said that SANAC’s plan demonstrated “what needs to be done, not only in South Africa but everywhere.” One wonders if this evolving awareness—manifested in two countries and by the head of the Global Fund so recently—will become evident in U.S. policy anytime soon.

Few issues are as contentious within the feminist movement as prostitution. This is certainly not a new divide—in fact, it dates back to radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s fierce opposition to pornography in the 1980s. But the issue continues to split feminists, and thus we lack a unified response in support of the human rights of sex workers.

Some radical feminists maintain that prostitution is inherently harmful and exploitative, regardless of the circumstances under which a woman enters the sex trade. Equality Now, a radical feminist organization that focuses on “ending violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world,” has a campaign to combat the United Nations recommendations that sex work be decriminalized.

Meanwhile, sex-positive and intersectional feminists emphasize the importance of agency and a deeper understanding of how class, race, and gender identity intersect in prostitution and openly advocate for sex workers’ rights. This conversation is an important one, yet it all too often ignores the voices and perspectives of actual sex workers themselves. If we as feminists claim to be about elevating marginalized women’s voices, why do many feminists continue to talk over and speak for sex workers?

RH Reality Check recently spoke with Minnie Scarlet, a porn model and performer; Darby Hickey, a sex worker and transgender rights activist; and Violet Rose, a sex worker from the United Kingdom, to hear about their experiences with feminism, what role they think feminism can play in sex workers’ rights, and more. Below is a lightly edited version of that discussion, which took place via email.

RH Reality Check: Many people have a preconceived notion about what “sex work” is or looks like. What do you want people to know about the kind of work that you do?

Darby Hickey: I think what is really important is to listen to people with actual experience in sex trade, because those experiences are extremely diverse (just like many other activities in life!) and do not conform neatly with ideological assumptions about empowerment, abuse, gender equity, etc. Doing sex work is not just like any other job, but sometimes, for some people, it is, or it’s even better. And sometimes, for some people, it is nothing at all like a job. And a million other variations in between and beyond. At the end of the day, the people directly involved need to have their rights protected, have their choices respected, and get support to increase their self determination in whatever ways they deem necessary. By closing down websites, increasing criminal penalties, or telling people they have to identify as victims to receive help, people are reducing the options available to those engaged in sex trade, and that is the opposite of what feminism should be about.

Minnie Scarlet: I love that I’m in a position where people listen to me. Granted, with the stigmas in our society, some will immediately write me off as some “porn slut” ([porn actress] Bree Olson herself called me that one time—the inner misogyny is so real), but it has given me an audience that I would not have had otherwise. Growing up a conventionally attractive woman, I realized quickly that there were many things I could use my looks for and could really take advantage of it. I know that people will always speak badly on women who use their looks or girls who are too focused on their aesthetics, but as a woman, it’s the best bet you have to be heard sometimes. Kind of like the double standard of teenage girls taking selfies, yet the selfies are what get the most likes, if that makes sense. I realized I had a lot to say at a young age, and using my sexuality and job, I have an amazing fan base that appreciate what I have to say about specific issues. I love the work that I do, but I love when my followers can really appreciate me, aside from the content I have out. I love when they realize the work put into everything and the tribulations women in this industry endure. That’s what makes me love my job and makes me want to shoot more scenes and keep going.

Violet Rose: Having “sex” for money does not mean I do [penis-in-vagina] penetration all day every day. Lots of my clients want to chat, do some other sex acts, or do something else entirely. BDSM isn’t weird or wrong. My clients mostly aren’t creepy, old, unattractive men. Clients differ as much as the rest of humanity (but financial privilege to afford to see sex workers still tends to rest with the most privileged). Sex work isn’t going to end. Policies to end demand cannot work. And in a world where opportunities to work are increasingly small, policies to end demand are violence against the most marginalized. Doing my work doesn’t prevent me from having a valid opinion (I don’t have false consciousness), and I deserve labor, human, and civil rights at work. I call my work a feminist act.

RHRC: What has your experience been like as a sex worker in feminist spaces?

VR: I have had diverse experiences. Some feminist spaces I go to are full of sex workers, which is awesome. Sometimes I have been to feminist spaces and been talked over, ignored, othered, patronized, demeaned, and insulted. Since I am not fully out, I can inhabit political spaces without outing myself if I want to, so I can check the temperature of a gathering before I make myself vulnerable by exposing my identity as a sex worker. Sometimes though, it is good for me to out myself before people even start. Sometimes I prefer they say stuff behind my back rather than to my face unknowingly.

Mostly though, I feel unsafe. Feminists have driven some of the most violent and dangerous legislation against sex workers’ rights, health, and safety worldwide, and I can’t feel great about that. I have to wait for someone in a feminist space to not only declare themselves in solidarity but also to show they are a good ally with certain behaviors before I feel like I can trust them not to be oppressive to sex workers.

MS: I have mixed experiences with feminist spaces because the different feminists I have met all tend to have different views on the sex industry. There is nothing inherently comforting to me about the word “feminist.” I used to see or hear that word and think it was someone I could feel a tiny bit safer with or at least relate to on a basic level. Unfortunately, I’ve been told by some feminists that by being in the porn industry, I was degrading and hurting women. Most of those feminists have been white scholar-types, which made it hard to notice that feminism has extreme class and race issues. Feminism without intersectionalism is nothing, especially when we’re talking about sex workers’ rights, considering a lot of sex workers do sex work for survival, not for empowerment/liberation/fun.

There have been feminists who have spoken over my sex worker peers and myself about how degrading porn is because you can’t prove what is consensual and not. They know this because of things they have read and they “know a couple of girls in the porn industry.” Hello! I’m a sex worker who works in porn! And I happen to know reputable companies generally give you a release to sign—a form that says you aren’t pressured to do anything you don’t want to—and even film you saying that before you do anything.

Obviously, there are flaws because the industry is run by humans, and I will never deny the incredible amount of terrible things in porn that need to be reformed. My point is, I have felt dismissed and silenced by feminists who thought their research was more credible than my first-hand experience. There is room for both opinions and both things to be talked about, but the moment their research is given more representation than my voice, it’s a problem. That’s my main concern.

The feminist spaces that have made me feel completely safe as a sex worker are usually accepting of trans/queer peoples and have little to do with what mainstream feminism focuses on.

DH: My experience with feminist spaces predates my involvement in sex trade/sex work, and it was already complicated. As a trans woman who grew up poor, the many ways in which what we are calling “mainstream feminism” failed me and my communities were obvious. On the other hand, like Minnie alludes to, feminism, feminist spaces, feminist individuals (whether friends/colleagues or writers/activists) helped me develop my own analysis a lot and changed how I look at the world.

There have been times when I have disavowed the label feminist, but I also used it to help organize a conference in D.C. that centered the intersectional feminism we are discussing here, that centered the experiences and thoughts of women of color, trans folks, and sex workers (shout out to Visions in Feminism). I was recently at a multi-generational gathering of academics and activists reflecting on the history of reproductive and sexual health and rights, and some of the speakers introduced me for the first time to the idea of “power” or “governance” feminists/feminism [Ed. note: “governance feminism” refers to the strategy of implementing feminism through the law.] I like this term better than “mainstream” because it really highlights how one set of folks in the feminist world prioritize gaining specific types of power and using the tools of that power (for example, government) to further their agenda. I think that stands in stark contrast to the more complicated approaches that many of the feminists who I stand with, feminists who focus more on dismantling power and creating alternative structures for holding those in power accountable. It is governance feminism that got us “feminist groups” advocating war in Afghanistan, for example, as well as of course anti-sex trade laws.

RHRC: Given that you’ve all had such diverse, and often contentious, experiences with feminists, what role, if any, do you think feminism can play in sex workers’ rights and advocacy?

MS: My wishes are for people in general to gain the knowledge necessary so that women wouldn’t have to elaborate their choices to such an extent, or at all, anymore. Most of the slut-shaming, whore-phobia, and other problems that contribute to the stigmatization of sex work manifest because of ignorance. Feminism has always been a learning process for me. My personal feminism stems mostly from wanting to understand normalized sexism and how it affects the big picture. In this situation, the normalized sexism can be something as common as casual slut-shaming, but in the bigger picture it adds to a problem that actually makes it physically unsafe for sex workers in certain situations.

If feminism has any role, it would be to educate people in general that women, whether you agree with their choices or not, are people who are capable of making their own decisions. By teaching people that, it would show people that things like calling a girl a “slut” actually is detrimental in ways that are much bigger than just the word. With that mentality, I think it’s easier for other changes in the industry to happen like better treatment to women on sets, better representation for what women want, less hate for the industry.

Feminism has so much power to change the industry by changing things that affect the industry. Feminism is about women’s rights and is much bigger than just how porn girls are treated, but I feel it definitely has an indirect place in the industry.

VR: Mainstream feminism has power—much more than the sex workers’ rights movement, and I think more political power than the sex industry itself, regardless of the financial disparity. I think feminism has the capacity to evolve an understanding of how power, sex, and gender affect people in an intersectional way, and I hope that when it does, the only acceptable standpoint within feminism will be for sex workers’ rights. I feel like feminist ideals like the right to vote are part of a wider understanding that minority groups need to represent their own interests. Feminists could support sex worker organizing and help amplify sex worker voices for their own representation at policy level.

DH: I think that Minnie and Violet really hit the point here already: In as much as some feminists and their sectors, organizations, and movements have more resources or credibility than those of us working for social justice for people in sex trade/sex work, they really need to step up. They are the ones better suited to go toe-to-toe with the anti-prostitution forces who cloak themselves in feminism. But I also am disillusioned that the “governance” feminists would ever change their tune, so I think we need to focus more on the sectors within feminism that are committed to grassroots movement building and alternatives to the current power structure, as well as seek cross-movement allies in the fights around immigration, criminal justice, or LGBT issues.

I think I would also disagree slightly with Violet—I think some of the most dangerous legislation regarding sex work has actually been driven by people who are not feminists, who are anti-feminist even, but who jump at the opportunity to work with “governance” feminists when they can. For example, the “anti-crime” or “social cleansing” people push for increased punishment for sex workers, “prostitution-free zones,” and so on, whereas the “feminists” push for increased punishments for clients, which we know also affects sex workers. But I do see a difference there. And while I’m not sure that one is worse than the other, if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I would say that the law that claims to penalize clients is the lesser of the evils. It’s still not good by any means, and I want to fight it against such laws, but we should have a complex analysis.

On Tuesday night, Pussy Division, an anonymous collective of Philadelphia-based feminist activists, started tweeting logos and posted a meme urging voters to vote no on retention of Judge Teresa Carr Deni, who six years ago reduced charges of an alleged gang rape of a sex worker to theft of services.

Pennsylvania activists have launched a campaign urging against the retention of Judge Teresa Carr Deni in Philadelphia municipal court in next week’s general election. The campaign is in response to a controversial ruling Deni made six years ago, when she reduced charges of an alleged gang rape of a sex worker to theft of services. The story made national headlinesat the time.

According to reports, a 20-year-old single mother agreed to sex with the defendant, Dominique Gindraw, in exchange for $150. After plans were made over Craigslist, the woman headed to a location that she thought was his home, but was actually an abandoned building. She agreed to have sex with his friend for another $100, but the friend brought a gun instead of money. Then two more men arrived, and “the four forced her to have sex at gunpoint,” according to the PhiladelphiaDaily News.

“She consented and she didn’t get paid,” she explained to the Daily News. “I thought it was a robbery.” She also said the case “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

The ruling, remarks about the victim, and subsequent fallout took place right before Deni was up for retention in 2007. In response, activists launched a grassroots “Deny Deni” campaign at polling places. In an unusual move, then chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association Jane Leslie Dalton issued a harsh rebuke of the judge, calling it an “unforgivable miscarriage of justice.”

Judge Deni’s retention of an armed robbery charge for “theft of services” in the case of a defendant accused of forcing a prostitute at gunpoint to have sex with him and three other men—and the related dismissal of all sex and assault charges —belies a basic understanding of what constitutes rape in Pennsylvania.

I have personally reviewed the transcript from the defendant’s preliminary hearing in this case. Based on my reading, the transcript clearly reflects that the victim decided she was not going to engage in sex with any of the men present, and that she was forced to do so at gunpoint. No one has denied or contradicted this.

Judge Deni’s belief that because the victim had originally intended to have sex for money and decided not to because she didn’t get paid posits that a woman cannot change her mind about having sex, or withdraw her consent to do so, regardless of the circumstances. We cannot imagine any circumstances more violent or coercive than being forced to have sex with four men at gunpoint.

The situation erupted only 28 days after the Philadelphia Bar Association had already formally recommended Deni for retention in the election. Officials explained that the bar did not retract the recommendation because, essentially, it would have taken too long to go through the process before election.

Gindraw was reportedly arrested for an almost identical crime four days later, according to reports.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Bar Association recently issued this year’s Judicial Selection and Retention ratings, which includes a recommendation to retain Deni in municipal court.

“The judge’s career is looked at in its entirety,” said attorney Teresa F. Sachs, speaking on behalf of the Philadelphia Bar Association. Sachs explains that when the association reviews judges, everything about his or her history, including media reports and social media postings, are taken into consideration.

On Tuesday night, Pussy Division, an anonymous collective of Philadelphia-based feminist activists, started tweeting logos and posted a meme urging voters to vote no on retention of Judge Deni. SlutWalk Philly also tweeted the message.

“We are really outraged that a judge in our city could preside over a case where a sex worker was raped at gunpoint and denied the rights of any other person,” a member of Pussy Division told RH Reality Check in an email. “This injustice has inspired us to work on a project around consent and the false idea that not everyone has the right to say no.”

Lindsay Roth is co-founder of the Philadelphia chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project and director of Project Safe, a collective of volunteers working to “promote human rights-based public health among women working in prostitution on the street in Philadelphia.”

“We don’t really have the capacity to run a campaign, but what I can say about sex workers is that … for a long time, sex workers have mistrusted the criminal justice system,” said Roth. “So … [Deni’s] ruling and comments didn’t really come as a surprise to us. [But] I’m happy to see other women’s groups and advocacy groups are picking up the advocacy of sex workers.”

One of the ways sex workers in Philadelphia protect themselves is by circulating a “bad date” alert sheet that informally documents sex workers’ reports of violence.

How common is violence against sex workers? Because of the tendency not to report, there are no reliable local statistics. But Roth says she hears about a “bad date” to add to the list almost every time she works outreach.

“And that’s someone willing to talk to a stranger about a time they were raped recently,” she says. “I’m always amazed that someone is willing to do that.”

Roth points out that violence takes the form of both direct violence, such as assault, and structural violence. “Women have tried to report sexual assault and other types of assault to law enforcement,” she said. “They don’t listen.”

Judge Deni did not return a request for comment.

The general election takes place November 5. If Deni retains her seat, it will be her fourth six-year term.

This summer, the effort to pass the Women's Equality Act in New York and the Supreme Court's decision involving the anti-prostitution pledge that applied to global funding to fight HIV and AIDS had implications for sex workers' rights.

This summer was a busy one for issues relating to sex work and trafficking in persons. In late June, the New York state legislature, despite much advocacy and pressure, did not pass Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ten-point Women’s Equality Act (WEA) into law. Cuomo had hoped to use the WEA as a multi-platform law that would advance the rights, health, and well-being of women across a number of critical concerns. He brought together issues around reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, and trafficking in persons under one umbrella. The effort supported the fact that these different aspects of gender equality are inherently tied together.

Around the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling in a case involving the anti-prostitution pledge that applied to global funding to fight HIV and AIDS. The Court made its decision on First Amendment grounds, stating that Congress can use the money it spends to prioritize certain types of goals and programs over others, but it can’t go so far as to require groups receiving grants to actually adopt and voice a particular viewpoint. This was an important and crucial decision, both because of the impact it had on health and empowerment programs around the world, and because the Court’s logic and reasoning did not focus on hysteria and false morality about sex work, but on the potential limits of government action in the context of free speech.

These developments in law and policy on issues relating to the rights and health of sex workers offer a window into the current arc of the movement for sex workers’ rights. While both addressed important issues of the day that affect all of us—not just sex workers and their allies—like HIV and trafficking in persons, they played out in very different ways.

The Women’s Equality Act has been very much removed from the sphere of sex workers and their rights, health, or empowerment. The WEA affected sex workers in that one of its goals was to strengthen human trafficking laws, but the bill language focused almost exclusively on criminal penalties on prostitution. While every law can be improved and developed in new and innovative ways, there was little recognition that New York already has one of the strongest anti-trafficking laws in the country; it includes appropriate penalties and offers needed services to survivors.

Initially, it was a challenge for anti-trafficking advocates who did not have an anti-prostitution agenda to get information on the WEA language. So not only were sex workers left out of advocacy on a bill that affected them directly, but even advocates who either support or have neutral positions on the rights of sex workers were considered outsiders.

Ultimately, the WEA failed because of its provisions on abortion—possibly the only issue more controversial and alienating than the rights and dignity of sex workers—but it was clear that the concerns and voices of all women were not going to be given equal weight when it came to trafficking in persons, which certainly won’t be stopped through criminal laws targeting prostitution.

The anti-prostitution pledge, in contrast, was introduced about a decade ago, and sex workers, public health advocates, and human rights lawyers worked together in different ways to document and publicize the dangers of a policy that required the very organizations offering help to sex workers to denounce them. The advocacy was not always seamless, and the culmination of this case in a Supreme Court decision based on the First Amendment, rather than on the rights and dignity of sex workers, reflects that. Sex workers’ rights advocate Tracy Quan notes, “Without sex workers diligently building a movement over many decades, this lawsuit would not have happened. Sex workers have been loudly protesting the anti-prostitution pledge since 2003, but our involvement in the Supreme Court challenge was carefully handled and rather muted.” The efforts were far from perfect, and the decision itself only affects U.S.-based recipients of funding, but it was always clear that sex workers would and should have a voice in the debate.

Everyone should have a fair chance to thrive and pursue opportunities in life. When people are trafficked, they are forced, tricked, or coerced to perform work against their will. Trafficked persons are made to live in a climate of fear. They often experience isolation and invisibility, are subjected to abuses of power by their employers, and have little or no access to help.

We need solutions that support the real needs of trafficking survivors, and of people at risk for HIV. Sex workers are making enormous progress in terms of advocacy and policy impact. But there is still a long way to go. As long as we do not examine our sexual attitudes and the policies that stem from a misunderstanding of our rights around sexual behavior and how to protect them, policymakers will continue to confuse sex work with trafficking and implement harmful policies on HIV without consequence for themselves. Sex workers’ rights advocates have an opportunity over the coming years to keep policymakers on their heels as we continue to build this strong global movement and bring to fruition the actual needs, lives, and dignity of sex workers everywhere.

Is it ever helpful, in policy terms, to lump together trafficking and sexual exploitation with the buying and selling of sexual services between consenting adults? This is the question in Argentina right now.

As I arrived in Buenos Aires this week, the Argentine Congress started discussing two bills purporting to deal with human trafficking. According to reports, one bill seeks to establish prison sentences for individuals who buy sex from victims of trafficking, while the other seeks to penalize anyone who buys sex at all, regardless of whether the person providing the sex is a consenting adult. (The government is not suggesting legislation to criminalize sex workers themselves.) No one would contest that actual sex trafficking is a problem in Argentina and that something should be done about it. The question is if it is ever helpful, in policy terms, to lump together trafficking and sexual exploitation with the buying and selling of sexual services between consenting adults.

The push to eradicate trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation is a legitimate goal for any government—in fact, it is an obligation. In Argentina, this objective has gained particular urgency in the wake of a decade-long, largely unsuccessful legal investigation into the abduction and forced prostitution of a young woman. In relation to that case, Amnesty International and other groups have criticized the lack of effective protection in Argentina against gender-based violence in general and trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation in particular.

But the evidence suggests that Argentina’s latest approach to address the problem may not be the best one. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has carried out studies and generated guidance on anti-trafficking initiatives. The organization has come to the conclusion that brothel raids and “rescues” that treat all sex workers as victims of violence contribute to decreased safety for sex workers by forcing many of them to move constantly from one place to another, undermining the social networks that can help to keep sex workers safe.

UNAIDS suggests that governments should instead take a nuanced approach that on the one hand recognizes the autonomy of individual adult sex workers and clients who act on their own volition, while on the other clamps down hard on sexual exploitation. In this context, sexual exploitation should include not only trafficking into forced prostitution, but also violent acts against voluntary sex workers (such as rape) and the use, offer, or procurement of a child for commercial sex acts.

The question is, of course, if there is such a thing as voluntary sex work.

In general, people who believe governments should treat trafficking and sex work as one and the same would answer “no” to that question. To this group of advocates, sex work is inherently violent; they believe that the people who say they engage in sex work voluntarily are in reality forced to do so by circumstances or structural disadvantages they may or may not see. The goal for such advocates is to eradicate sex work, rather than trafficking, and the assumption is that the criminal law is an effective tool in advancing this goal.

It is undeniable that sex workers, like everyone else, make decisions about their lives and livelihoods that are at least in part informed by the opportunities available to them. For some sex workers, opportunities are severely limited because they belong to a disadvantaged group in terms of gender, income level, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, and many may have chosen a different path given a different context.

It is also undeniable that the notion of exchanging sexual services for money makes many people very uncomfortable. I would venture that most parents would rather not see their children having sex for a living. And it is certainly true that many people would prefer not to see sex workers at all, leading to initiatives to curb street solicitation that often do little to promote sex worker safety.

However, it is not clear why our discomfort with sex for money should lead us to disregard, wholesale, the decisions made by sex workers themselves. When I did research on access to reproductive health services in Argentina, I spoke to women who felt empowered by their sex work, because it was the only relationship in which they felt they had some measure of control. And when I did research on discrimination based on HIV-status in the Dominican Republic, I spoke to women who were mortified that sex work was the only avenue open to them after they were fired from hotel and factory jobs. Both groups of women had made decisions in an imperfect context, but neither group would benefit from brothel raids and the blanket criminalization of their clients. In fact, treating these women as if their choices do not matter is unlikely to empower them to overcome structural abuse.

In Argentina, trafficking into forced prostitution remains a problem. However, not all sex workers are trafficked or remain in commercial sex work against their will. As Argentina’s congress—and many other countries—debate how to deal with both of these issues, they would do well to remember that to be effective a policy approach must be grounded in evidence and supported by those who are meant to benefit from it.